Social Media Fueling Network Cascades
With technology dominating our social landscape, an increasingly large number of people place importance on social media and the validation they receive from social media likes. The article talks about how the fast-paced nature of social media has driven our society to overshare without enough time to think first. We want to feel accepted by other people and in the social media world, that comes from the number of likes we receive on our posts. This can often lead to mob mentality, where people see that a certain population of people have a collective opinion and they decide to adopt that opinion as their own.
A benefit that social media provides is that we are exposed to so many different opinions and sources; however, it can sometimes spiral the wrong way. You can start by having a certain stance on a topic but end up unconsciously forcing yourself to take on a different stance after seeing that your original opinion is a minority opinion on social media. Another case could be that your first introduction to a topic and an opinion regarding that topic is through a popular social media post, which makes it easy for you to adopt that opinion because it has so many likes so it seems that most people agree with it. Sometimes, this large collective point of view is harmless, but this mob mentality can be harmful when it attacks an innocent person, organization, etc. through an uneducated mob. Social media is so fast-paced that it doesn’t give us time to sit down and form our own thoughts and opinions before having posts with hundreds of likes and comments thrown at our faces, causing a network cascade.